05-30-2021, 05:23 PM
(05-30-2021, 03:55 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Seems like our numbers are holding steady...not really good. We must be a significantly increasing portion of the cases in all of Ontario.
Do we have any data yet on how effective vaccines are against the new B.1.617 variant that appears to be significantly more transmissible than previous VOCs, given that it is starting to spread here, and we are highly reliant on rolling out vaccines...that's kind of a make or break situation for us I'd think.
Here is the chart for Waterloo Region. One factor is that the third wave was never as big in our region, so the drop has also been more gradual. The active case count is down from a high of 750 to the current 352, and is continuing to drop steadily.
The early estimates is that the vaccine effectiveness is down only by about 10% (for BioNTech-Pfizer and AZ, presumably others will be similar) so at the moment it does not appear dramatically worse.
Not-yet-peer-reviewed article here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/...21257658v1